If you’re not yet a fan of Twitter, let me say this—tweeting is not just for the birds. In fact, Twitter has become a very effective marketing tool in many marketing strategies. It’s a great way to gain exposure, connect with your customers, promote your business, and it takes just a little effort and time.

Here are five reasons why you should be tweeting.

You’ll be visible. Everybody and their brother is online and on their mobiles, posting statuses, checking in, tweeting about this and writing about that. If you want to stay on your customers’ radar, you need to show up on social media, period. And Twitter is not just about touting your products and services. It’s about engaging and connecting with your customers. Let’s face it—in this digital age, your customers expect that.

It can help with SEO. Facebook and Twitter rank among the highest when it comes to social media sites, so if you update your status/tweets frequently, you’ll likely increase your search engine rankings for your business. Will this happen overnight? Probably not, but with frequent updates you will direct targeted traffic to your website and help your business rank higher.

It’s free. As far as cost-effective marketing goes, you won’t find something better than social networking. Where else do you have a potential audience of thousands without forking over a bunch of money? Twitter is free, and if you invest a little time, you can build an impressive following quickly.

It’s easy. Tweeting doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Think “five.” That’s a good number of tweets to aim for each day. With five short messages a day you can communicate a lot of information. You can talk about new trends in the print industry, offer special promotions to your followers, give shout-outs to other companies you’ve partnered with—there are hundreds of ways to use this social network with minimal effort.

You can integrate your Twitter stream with your website. This is an excellent way to make your tweets reach even farther. Plus, it helps you build better relationships with your customers and website visitors, get valuable feedback and gain more followers.

The process to do this is very simple. When you go in to your Springboard to add the Content Type, you will automatically be taken to the authorization screen on Twitter. Once authorized, the Apps screen in the setting for your Twitter account will show Firespring Springboard. I recommend that you authorize with a Twitter account that is associated with your business, not an individual employee’s account.

Once authorized, you’ll be directed back to the Springboard where you should fine-tune the display options to make sure it’s displaying the correct Twitter handle and choose how many tweets you want to display (up to 10).